Page:Neatby - A history of the Plymouth Brethren.djvu/202

 sacred toil, in loneliness, in bereavement, in hope deferred, during their devoted exile in the East. Cronin was a warm-hearted man and a fervent Christian, and he must be credited with acting from a sincere conviction, and at some cost to his own feelings. His act was only an early case of a species of persecution that is still running its baneful course. No sooner is the cry of “unfaithfulness to Christ” raised, than a multitude of good people are ready, almost without enquiry, to take it up and to inflict upon themselves and their friends all manner of suffering in the hope of approving themselves clear in the matter. The history of the execution of Darby’s discipline against Bethesda is an illustration, stretching over fifty years, of the old but as yet unmastered principle that the spirit of panic is the spirit of cruelty.

In 1864, only two years before his fraternal note to the dying Craik, Darby wrote to a Brother in Sheffield, “The evil at Bethesda is the most unprincipled admission of blasphemers against Christ, the coldest contempt for Him I ever came across”. Now this statement was not merely an incalculable exaggeration; it was absolutely false, root and branch, and an excellent instance of smoke without fire. And Darby would have known it to be false, if some sign of a relenting towards Bethesda on the part of certain of his followers had not roused him to frenzy. But statements of this kind were taken on trust by persons who only knew that Darby had been the most potent force in their spiritual development, and saw him in the ordinary course of his life a humane and excellent man; and the results were deplorable. Sometimes, indeed, the cry was met with a calm self-possession before which it fell powerless. Standing in a group of Brethren in Dublin, in 1852, Darby charged them with “acquiescence in unfaithfulness to Christ”. “Dear